Let’s Play Good News / Bad News
Good News: I have a new job! Or rather, I got a new job tacked onto my current job! I’ve been working at a local public library for two years now. I started off as an on call clerk and back in May, I got hired on as a part time clerk. We had a couple of people retiring and switching around positions lately and I’ve now been hired on to be the library’s admin person, as well as continuing to be a clerk starting Wednesday. They are letting my two part time jobs meld into one full time job, which includes all the benefits and pay upgrades that gives me. I also no longer have to work weekends because admin work = during the week. I might finally be able to move out of my parent’s house, you guys. I’m so excited.
Bad News: Wednesday night, a tired but extremely thirsty Molly decided to get herself a glass of milk and drink it in bed while watching Youtube. One ill-timed arm movement later, that milk ended up all over her sheets, pillow and, oh, laptop. At the time of this writing, the trackpad doesn’t work and weird noises emanate from it. At the time of this writing, it is unknown how screwed Molly is but she assumes she is pretty screwed. Goodbye, first few paychecks of new job!
Movie pass in hand, I went and saw The Grudge last week with a friend. He only agreed to go because my ticket is free due to unlimited pass and I also had enough points on my card to get a second free ticket. When you have to tell your friend that we can both go for free to get him to attend a movie with you, that says something about the movie, nevermind the fact that neither of us had even seen it yet.
I went in knowing nothing besides the fact that it was a remake of the remake of The Grudge from 2004, something that so clearly speaks in its favor, and that the main character was named Detective Muldoon, which is what sold me. If nothing else, I could pretend I was a detective solving a supernatural mystery which is all I’ve ever wanted for my life.
Turns out that the muddled plot of the new movie is that a mom was working in Tokyo (???), went to the original Grudge house, then came home and brought the grudge to suburban Pennsylvania??? Normally when the grudge follows you, you’re haunted by the original people but in this case, the mom kills her family and then the middle class white family are the super scary ghosts haunting everyone so I’m not entirely sure what the point of connecting it to the original Tokyo house was. If there lore is that a super heinous murder can create just an evil house, then it should have just started with a new horrible murder? Am I thinking too hard about this?
One thing I wish was better accomplished because it’s a very cool idea is that, after the original murder, the movie tells the story of all the people touched by the house in the two years since the original crime happened. This includes the detective who investigated the original crime, the realtor (John Cho!) selling the house, the couple who ends up buying the house and Detective Muldoon, the cop who investigates a crime connected to the second couple. The idea of following each person touched by a haunted house sounds really cool to me and it also needs to be an anthology series on Netflix or something because a 90 minute movie is not the place to do it. They kept trying to build our pathos for the characters (the realtor and his wife are finally pregnant but there’s something wrong with the baby! the wife in the older couple is terminally ill! Detective Muldoon’s husband just died of cancer and she and her kid just moved to town to try and move on!) but because they only got something like 20 minutes each, there’s not enough time to develop anything.
The best part of the movie is one scene where John Cho is left alone with a little ghost girl who he thinks is a girl who’s just home alone (and super sinister looking for some reason) and decides to stay with her until her parents come home (spoiler alert: they are also dead.) The scene then fasts forwards to the evening when he tries to call the dad again. And the best part of the movie is imagining John Cho awkwardly hanging out with a tiny ghost girl for about six hours. Her sitting silently, glaring slightly, John Cho trying to make small talk. It’s very silly.
I guess what I came out of this movie with is that I want a prestige American Grudge miniseries? Who could have known?
When I was young, my mother always used to tease that when I was rich and famous, I’d have to buy her something special. Now, I am in no way rich and famous now, but I did get a big (for me) check from one of my books last year and with that, I bought my mother and I season tickets to Broadway in Portland, the touring broadway shows. It was always a tradition that we went to one a year and now we get to go to all of them. The seats are great (like I said, not rich) but we get to go and enjoy a night together and I really love it.
The first show of the season was Miss Saigon which I absolutely hated. Never have I truly hated a play before that night. Only once have I walked out of a play at intermission, in Stratford-upon-Avon no less, but that was because the play was so immensely boring (it was some indie play about a British family moving to India in the 30s, I think??) that I figured I’d rather get an earlier train home than sit through it. Joke was on me when there wasn’t an earlier train and I just sat at the train station for an hour and a half, I suppose. I didn’t walk out of Miss Saigon because I wanted to know what happened, even if I was mildly uncomfortable the whole time. Plus, if my mother was liking it, I didn’t want to ruin it for her. But at the end, when an extremely ridiculous death scene just …. lingers, my mother elbowed me and when I looked over, she just gave me this look
which meant I had to contain my giggles as a super sad thing was happening on stage. When the play ended, we were both on the same “wtf was that” page and yeah, I don’t have to see Miss Saigon ever again.
This week, though, we had our second show, Fiddler on the Roof. I went through a “watch all the movie musicals!” phase in high school and Fiddler was high on the list back then. We saw it when it came to town ten years ago (and that production starred Topol, the actor who played Tevye in the 1971 movie version. Can you imagine playing the same role forty years apart??) and that was fun so I was looking forward to this one.
What impressed me the most, I think, about this production is that it tried to do something a little different with a well worn script. It started with a man in modern clothes reading a book at the abandoned Anatevka rail station. As he read, he took of his jacket and slowly became Tevye. The play then continued as normal but at the end, as everyone left Anatevka, it became a dramatic scene, the actors silhouetted against a stark white background walking in silence. I really enjoyed this little frame narrative and thought it was a great addition to the story. A huge part of my MA dissertation was on silent scenes in well known plays so I guess this was a bit up my alley but I was impressed.
Fiddler is a great play filled with great music and impressive dance sequences. I’ve been singing the soundtrack all week, mostly to my cat. I think he enjoys “If I Were a Rich Cat.” It was a good transition play after the horrible Miss Saigon and in a few weeks we’re seeing Dear Evan Hansen, which I’m incredibly pumped about. I saw it for the first time last year from the very last row on the very top balcony in a theater in Seattle and wept copiously the whole show so I’m looking forward to sharing it with my mother while also being able to actually see the actors.
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